WHY THE HELL ARE YOU STILL READING US? DOES JUDITH MILLER HAVE TO KILL YOU HERSELF? Get Your War On does the Times.


posted by michael  1:31:57 PM  
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Everything's coming up Sistani. Imagine my discomfort at agreeing, even provisionally, with a right-winger. Here's Tacitus on the (apparent, and obviously fragile) deal to end the American offensive against Moqtada al Sadr:

As with Fallujah, so with Sadr: it appears we are choosing an illusory political solution and abandoning our original stated goals. ... Expect CPA rhetoric shortly on how Najaf, et al., are "secure," and how the "fighting has ended," or something very similar. These things will be presented as victories, as if they were our aims all along. But they weren't: Najaf was never a wholesale city in arms the way Fallujah was, and we had no interest in holding it for its own sake; and our stated aims in this campaign were the death or capture of Moqtada Sadr, and the destruction of the Mehdi Army. Neither of these aims were achieved. This is not victory.

The Mehdi Army remains a force in being. Moqtada al-Sadr walks free. And, as in Anbar province, home of Fallujah, we can expect that the killing will simply shift elsewhere. Another American failure to secure victory begins its slow transformation into a perceived American defeat. Question: are we at all capable of articulating and sticking with a coherent strategic or operational goal? Why not?

Needless to say, I don't share Tacitus' warblogger angst about the developments, nor his conclusion (follow the link within the quote to his remarkable Fallujah cri de coeur) that the better part would be to fight the thing through to its bloody and politically impossible end.

Yes, ruthlessly pursued, a war of attrition against the Mahdi army would have resulted in its annihilation and Sadr's death or arrest. Just as, certainly, we might have wreaked wholesale slaughter on Fallujah (as opposed to the moderate and piecemeal slaughter we committed instead) until opposition there ceased. What commentators like Tacitus seem incapable of understanding is that not every act of restraint, nor every retreat, of a superior military force in the face of an inferior represents a mere failure of backbone or of strategic vision. I certainly wouldn't be last in line to accuse this Administration of fecklessness and wavering in its conduct of the war in Iraq. But the Bush mistake—on the smaller scale (Fallujah, Najaf) as on the larger (the Iraq invasion itself)—is always in beginning the fight in the first place. Unlike Tacitus, I have no desire to see good money, as it were, thrown after bad. There are "victories" that are too costly to bear: and political costs are real costs in war, just as lives are.

Tacitus might have realized what cooler heads at the CPA evidently did, when they decided belatedly to accept a démarche that Sadr had already proposed earlier in the week, if he'd read the Times story on the agreement. (Admittedly, he'd have had to persist through to the jump page, where Derek Filkins—who appears to be trying as hard as he can to soft-pedal the "compromise"—buries some real information that nobody else seems to have.)

The agreement fell into place after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful Shiite leader, sent a message to the Americans urging them to approve the deal.

According to two Iraqi Shiite leaders, American officials signed onto the agreement after they received a forceful note from Ayatollah Sistani and other senior clerics, passed to them by Iraqi's national security adviser, Mowaffak al-Rubaie.

"The religious leadership passed a strong warning to the Americans yesterday to end the standoff in Najaf peacefully," said Hamed Khafaf, an aide to Ayatollah Sistani.

Had they refused, Mr. Khafaf said, the ayatollah, convinced that the presence of American forces so near the Imam Ali Shrine was unsustainable, "would not stay silent." That appeared to be a threat to speak out directly against the Americans.

"Agreement by U.S. and Rebels to End Fighting in Najaf"

Clear enough? Even here, Filkins tries to cushion the blow: but the deal hardly just "fell into place," and this was clearly more than the mere sending of a message. Sistani, who from the appearance of this thing has found an opportunity to reassert his political control, made it clear to the Americans that the victory toward which they were driving would be attended with consequences they could not, in any prudence, accept. The likeliest consequence being a Sistani fatwa against the American presence in Iraq, or something not far short of it.

Tacitus may be willing to accept a general Shiite uprising as a price worth paying for our showing resolve against Moqtada al Sadr. For myself, I'm glad that Jerry Bremer et al. aren't.

posted by michael  12:54:37 PM  
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